


Tea and Spellwork

by jolecia



Series: Hogwarts Professors AU [1]
Category: Poldark (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, Fluff, Hogwarts Professors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 22:44:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17068574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jolecia/pseuds/jolecia
Summary: Hogwarts Professor AU - Professor George Warleggan of the Arithmancy Department is not particularly looking forward to Christmas this year. His colleague, Professor Elizabeth Chynoweth and teacher of Charms, however, might just be able to change his mind.





	Tea and Spellwork

Snow was falling thick and fast over the grounds of Hogwarts, but Professor George Warleggan of the Arithmancy Department paid barely any heed to the fluffy white flakes floating lazily down from the sky outside the frosted window of his office, high up in one of the castle’s turrets. He had his back to the scene, bent over at his desk with a frown on his face as he scribbled some very pointed notes in the margins of one of his student’s work with red ink. He had been doing this for over an hour, and with each essay he read from the fourth year class, the more dispirited he became. Honestly, it was as if they had not learnt anything at all. Personally, he blamed the festive spirits that were currently pervading the inhabitants of the school, brought on largely by the presence of the snow. The fourth years, like the majority of his classes, were generally quite studious, but the enthusiasm over this coming Christmas had made it rather hard for anyone to concentrate on their work.

George sighed, pushing back the spectacles—several years of examining minutiae in darkened rooms had led to him requiring them, at least for the purpose of reading, at a depressingly young age—which had slipped down to the tip of his nose with one finger. There had been times, these past days, when he was quite convinced that he was just about the only person in the castle who was less than thrilled by the approach of the festive season. Though he did not dislike Christmas per say, he didn’t exactly see it as a cause for any great excitement. Where for many it would be a time of cheer and happiness, to spend time with their well-loved friends and family, for him, aside from the customary school feast on the day itself, it would not hold a great deal out of the ordinary. That, of course, he told himself firmly, didn’t bother him at all. Well…not very much anyway.

He could return to Cardew for the day, he considered, and spend it with his uncle, but the moment the thought had crossed his mind, he pushed it violently away. The general unpleasantness of the man’s company aside, Uncle Cary had been resolutely refusing to speak to him ever since he accepted the teaching position at Hogwarts a year and a half ago. Cary, who was a muggle—and one who did not at all care for magic, nor his nephew’s ability to wield it, had just about been able to tolerate him attending Hogwarts as a boy, and his previous career in the Ministry of Magic, as long as he did not neglect his duties for the Warleggan Bank, the business that he had inherited from his late father upon coming of age. Apparently, choosing to take employment and accommodation in a school of witchcraft and wizardry miles and miles away in the north of Scotland without any clear idea of when—or indeed if—he was coming back counted as the highest degree of negligence in his uncle’s eyes. Well, George supposed that was fair, but he had been spread so thin for years, caught between the demands of the Ministry, of his uncle, and of his father’s business, which required that under no circumstances could any of his muggle clientele discover the other secret half of their banker’s life. He had had to choose a side in the end, and when neither had proven overly satisfactory, he had forged a third path for himself instead. He just wished that Uncle Cary would understand this. As much as he disliked the man, he was his only living family, and he would have appreciated it if Cary could have at least brought himself to acknowledge his existence, even if all else were beyond him.

He was pulled abruptly out of his train of thought by soft knocking on the other side of the door. Carefully setting aside the essay he had been marking, along with his goose-feather quill, he called out a sharp “enter”, wondering who on earth could be wishing to visit him at this time of the evening. The door creaked open, and into the room stepped Professor Elizabeth Chynoweth, Hogwarts’ Charms teacher and Head of Ravenclaw, resplendent as ever in robes of midnight blue, her long dark hair pulled up into an elegant coil draped over her shoulder. George’s expression, which had settled into the customary sternness he employed amongst his students, immediately softened upon seeing her.

As both Hogwarts’ newest member of staff and something of a recluse compared to the others, he had very few genuine friends among the teachers. He preferred to keep himself to himself as a general rule, often taking his meals in his office when he was especially busy—a habit he had picked up from his long and often unpredictable working hours when he had still been living at Cardew. Nevertheless, he was not entirely without companionship. The school’s Deputy Headmistress, Professor Caroline Enys, who taught Transfiguration and was quite a force of nature in and of herself, has seemed determined to befriend him whether he wanted it or not. Her husband, Dwight, who was the school healer, had been equally (though fortunately far less alarmingly) welcoming, but as there was generally little need for their paths to cross, they rarely saw a great deal of each other. It was Elizabeth, however, whose concern and kindness he never felt pressured by when she sought him out to talk, that he felt the closest to. In fact, sometimes, when he found himself noticing how prettily the firelight from the candles in the Great Hall danced in her dark curls, or how warm inside he would feel when she smiled at him, he suspected he might feel a little _too_ close to her. He had tried to quash those thoughts as best he could throughout the previous year—it would hardly do for him to be so obviously awestruck by his colleague, as he had been on his first day when he had been introduced to her by the Headmaster—but he had been most unsuccessful in that endeavour. If anything, becoming better acquainted with her had rooted those feelings deeper.

“Professor Chynoweth, to what do I owe the pleasure?” He smiled gently at her. As soon as he had seen her once again at the beginning of the autumn term after the two months of holiday, he had been forced to accept that he had been fighting a losing battle in that regard, and had resolved to give up any attempt to deny to himself what he felt for her, even if he doubted he would ever be brave enough to speak of it directly.

Elizabeth hovered uncertainly on the threshold of the room, her hand resting loosely on the still half-open door.

“I confess I hoped not to disturb you, but I see that I am,” she said, with a pointed look at the partially-marked pile of essays on his desk. “Perhaps I shall return at a more convenient time?”

“Oh, you aren’t disturbing me,” George was quick to reassure her. “I have plenty of time to finish those off later. And besides, I fear that if I read any more tonight, I shall lose all confidence that I am possessed of any teaching ability whatsoever.”

Elizabeth shot him a look of sympathy, stepping fully into the room and closing the door behind her with a soft click.

“That bad?,” she sighed. “Well, rest assured you aren’t alone. I was attempting to teach the banishing charm to the fourth years today, and I am sure you know what it is like when the students are high-spirited—absolute chaos! Half of us were hiding under the desks from the objects soaring about the room. I had to take Adrian Blishwick up to the hospital wing after he got a concussion from being hit in the head by a flying carriage clock!”

George winced. Suddenly his abysmal essays didn’t seem nearly so bad.

“Oh dear,” he said. “It sounds as if you have had quite a day. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you—”

“It is no trouble,” George interrupted her, gesturing for her to take the seat on the other side of his desk. “I was just about to make one for myself.”

Elizabeth smiled at him gratefully.

“Oh, well, if you insist” she replied as she sat down.

There was a brief lull in the conversation while George charmed the water in the kettle to boil with a flick of his wand—he generally disapproved of needless magic, but he could not deny that it did make some things easier—but it was broken soon enough by Elizabeth’s quiet sigh. George turned back to face, having headed over to the other side of the room and taken two porcelain cups and a silver strainer out of the cabinet at the far wall. She was staring out across the grounds, watching the snow spiral downwards from the heavens as if hypnotised.

“It is this weather, I think,” she murmured with a frown. “It makes them so excitable. They can’t settle to anything.”

George, who quite agreed with her assessment, let out a small hum as he set the two teacups down on the desk, placing a spoonful of tea leaves into the strainer before pouring the water into them.

“Well, at least tomorrow is Saturday,” he said as he summoned a small jug of milk from the kitchens to add to the tea, “They will be able to pelt each other with snow to their heart’s content then. Perhaps it shall expel some of their excess energy.”

Elizabeth smiled ruefully.

“Perhaps” she replied, accepting the cup as he pushed it carefully towards her, before taking his own seat on the other side of the desk.

“Believe me, it could have been much worse,” he made to console her when the little frown between her brows persisted. “As I recall, when we were learning the banishing charm, Francis kept sending poor Professor Merriweather flying across the room instead of the cushions we were meant to be working on.”

Elizabeth laughed, but there was a slight hint of melancholy in her expression which he was sure must be mirrored upon his own face. Francis Poldark had been a mutual friend of theirs. Elizabeth who, like Francis, had come from one of Cornwall’s oldest pureblood wizarding families, had known him since they were small children. He had also been the first friend that George had made at Hogwarts, and though they had been sorted into different houses—Hufflepuff and Slytherin respectively—they had remained close both throughout their schoolyears and after it. Unfortunately, however, Francis had, just as he had been inclined to at school, become involved in one of his reckless cousin’s foolhardy forays into the muggle mining industry, and not a month later after his decision to invest in Wheal Grace, George had found himself attending his best friend’s funeral. The ill-feeling that had been festering between himself and Ross had only worsened after that—George knew, rationally, that nobody was truly at fault for Francis’ death, but he couldn’t help but feel as if the man’s tendency to involve his cousin in his ill-fated schemes had been something of a contributing factor to that awful event—so he supposed that it was best that he had elected to remove himself from the situation entirely before the increasingly ridiculous feud they had found themselves in escalated even further than it had done already.

“Well, at least I can be glad that I have escaped that fate,” Elizabeth remarked, pulling him abruptly out of his rather sombre train of thought. “I suppose there isn’t so much of a risk of those sorts of things happening in your classes?”

George smirked wryly, welcoming the distraction from his dark thoughts as he took a careful sip from the steaming cup before him.

“Not exactly,” he agreed. “The lack of wand-work does make the students rather less accident prone. The most I have to face from them right now is a dangerous lack of critical thinking.”

He glanced down at the pile of essays which he had pushed to the side of his desk with a slight grimace. Elizabeth followed his gaze curiously.

“Oh dear,” she said. “What is the essay about?”

“Oh, I asked for a roll of parchment on the limitations of the usage of arithmancy and numerology in the art of divination,” George replied. “Personally, I would have thought that why one might not wish to rely too heavily on determining a person’s character through the use of number charts based on the sum total of letters in their name is readily apparent, but I fear for many of our pupils, the thought that the magic which they study here may have its flaws is a little beyond their comprehension as of yet.”

Elizabeth hummed quietly at his words, taking a sip of her own tea, and George couldn’t quite tell whether it was a noise of agreement or simply of acknowledgement.

“I can’t say I know a great deal about Arithmancy,” she remarked thoughtfully as she placed her cup back down on its saucer with a soft clink. “I never studied it at school, but I’ve always heard that it is a very precise art.”

George nodded.

“Oh, it is,” he agreed—that, after all, had been largely why the subject had appealed to him in the first place. “Or rather the _methodology_ is precise—much more so than anything you might find in a Divination class—but its results are no more conclusive or definite than anything you might find in our tea leaves, for example.”

Elizabeth’s lips quirked as she glanced down at her half-drunk cup of tea.

“Oh, don’t say that,” she said drily, “otherwise I’ll have to conclude that Arithmancy can tell you nothing at all. My skills in that particular brand of Divination are almost completely non-existent.”

“And mine,” George replied. “In all honesty I’ve never set much store by fortune-telling, no matter the method by which one might come to their conclusions. I do believe that numbers hold a rudimentary form of magic, but there is only so much they can tell you that you cannot find out for yourself through observation and shrewdness. It is the actions and words of a person that truly tells you about their character. Arithmancy only facilitates that, to a certain extent.”

“In that case, what made you decide to teach it? If you don’t mind me asking?”

His eyes flicked up to her face to find her regarding him with a look of intense curiosity. Swallowing, he briefly ducked his head, unable to hold her gaze. He had never spoken to anyone about his reasons for coming to work at Hogwarts, save to his uncle amidst their numerous arguments on the subject, and he wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject with complete honesty, even to her. Instead, he gave a little shrug, picking at an invisible mite of dust on the desk in front of him with a finger.

“The position was available,” he said. “It was a subject that I did particularly well in at school and I always enjoyed the precision of it. Besides, just because it is a limited branch of magic, that doesn’t mean that it has no value as a subject. It requires a great deal of focus and concentration, and attention to detail. To be successful at Arithmancy, one must first discipline the mind. I suppose that is what I appreciate most about the subject.”

Elizabeth nodded pensively, chin propped up on one long elegant hand. Her gaze, which had been fixed upon him as he spoke, drifted towards the fire crackling in the grate. George watched her carefully out of the corner of his eye. The flickering light of the flames bathed her face in a warm yellow glow, the green-brown of her eyes almost golden under her long dark lashes, and as always, he could not help but be struck by how very beautiful she was.

“Will you be staying here for Christmas?” she asked suddenly, causing George to start as he was brought abruptly out of his reverie. Blinking owlishly up at her, he wondered whether she was asking out of politeness, or whether there was something else that had prompted the question. He had thought—or perhaps hoped—that he had heard something in her tone, something a little odd, that would have suggested the latter, but maybe that had simply been wishful thinking on his part.

“Y-yes, I imagine so.”

Elizabeth smiled at him, bright and happy, and George couldn’t help but think that the warmth of the expression was double that of the roaring fire beside him.

“Oh good,” she said, and there was a distinct note of relief in her voice which he definitely had not imagined this time. “I fear there shall not be a great many of us this year, and no doubt I shall be sorely in want of company. If you do not object, of course.”

“I—,” George, who was feeling rather shy all of a sudden, flushed pink at her words, not quite sure how to respond. “I do not object, no.”

“Good,” Elizabeth sent him a soft, genuine smile, before her expression took on a decidedly teasing quality, “because Caroline has threatened to drag you down to the Great Hall by your ear if you fail to appear at the Christmas feast.”

“Oh dear.” Quite believing Professor Enys to be capable of and willing to resort to such measures, he resolved silently never to give her cause to carry them out in future.

“And,” Elizabeth continued unexpectedly, her smile as warm and kind as ever, but this time quite serious, “because I should be very disappointed if I had no chance to see you on the day.”

George blinked in surprise, finally daring to properly meet her gaze as he searched the look in her eyes for her meaning, but he could find nothing there save the softness of her expression and the earnestness of her words. Taken rather aback by her sincerity, he dipped his head down to hide the small, pleased smile that was beginning to creep across his features. Perhaps, he thought, just perhaps this Christmas may not be so bad after all.

“In that case, Professor Chynoweth, I shall endeavour not to disappoint you.”

The smile she gave him, as far as he was concerned, could have outshone the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm planning on making a series of one-shots out of this AU, so hopefully I'll be able to get the next one finished just before or just after Christmas.


End file.
